Bridget Jones with a chainsaw: don’t be surprised if this is one of the more popular beach-reads of the summer.
Sick of all those losers you’ve been dating? Send them to Cassandra’s: she’ll have them shaped up in no time.
Best known for his tongue-in-cheek “Rex” dinosaur p.i. mystery series, Garcia (Matchstick Men, 2002, etc.) shows himself an adroit student of the chick-lit genre—before giving it a serious goosing. Cassandra French is likable, all things told, even though at 29 she’s a self-involved in-house lawyer for a big movie studio with a bevy of annoying ticks (such as assigning herself letter grades in all aspects of life). Still, she generally comes off as well meaning. It doesn’t hurt that her two best friends, Claire and Lexi (the latter, like her dogs, is “beautiful, vicious, and easily distracted”), are even shallower, so Cassandra’s general lack of interest in work or anything outside finding a man or dealing with her under-house-arrest mother, doesn’t look so bad. Garcia pulls off a pretty amazing sleight-of-hand here: just when he has you settling into a vacuous, glittery, forgettable read, he drops the bomb. The finishing school of the title isn’t a metaphor, and those “boys” in Cassandra’s basement whom she’s always running home from the office to feed aren’t dogs. They’re three men she’s kidnapped and kept, chained and drugged, while she puts them through a months-long program of cultural, social, and sexual etiquette training. Even though they’re cuffed and weak from all the morphine and low-protein foods, the guys—all buffoons who disappointed her in some fashion, including one who pulled a drunken grope during a blind date at a baseball game—appreciate what Cassandra’s doing for them. This proves helpful when a fourth one (Brad Pitt–hot actor Jason Kelly) gets chloroformed and tossed into the population after seducing Cassandra for less-than-romantic reasons. Garcia knows the conventions so well that his satire slithers by almost unnoticed.
Bridget Jones with a chainsaw: don’t be surprised if this is one of the more popular beach-reads of the summer.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-073031-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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